Girl Dinner

Title: Girl Dinner
Author: Olivie Blake
Published: October 21, 2025 by Tor Books
Format: Kindle, 368 Pages
Genre: Horror

Blurb:Every member of The House, the most exclusive sorority on campus, and all its alumni, are beautiful, high-achieving, and universally respected.

After a freshman year she would rather forget, sophomore Nina Kaur knows being one of the chosen few accepted into The House is the first step in her path to the brightest possible future. Once she's taken into their fold, the House will surely ease her fears of failure and protect her from those who see a young woman on her own as easy prey.

Meanwhile, adjunct professor Dr. Sloane Hartley is struggling to return to work after accepting a demotion to support her partner's new position at the cutthroat University. After 18 months at home with her newborn daughter, Sloane's clothes don’t fit right, her girl-dad husband isn’t as present as he thinks he is, and even the few hours a day she's apart from her child fill her psyche with paralyzing ennui. When invited to be The House’s academic liaison, Sloane enviously drinks in the way the alumnae seem to have it all, achieving a level of collective perfection that Sloane so desperately craves.

As Nina and Sloane each get drawn deeper into the arcane rituals of the sisterhood, they learn that living well comes with bloody costs. And when they are finally invited to the table, they will have to decide just how much they can stomach in the name of solidarity and power.

My Opinion: Blake is one of those authors you either fall for or quietly back away from. There’s rarely a middle ground. My first encounter with her work was Gifted & Talented, which I ended up enjoying far more than I expected, so when Girl Dinner crossed my path, I figured I was ready for whatever she had in store.

Turns out, I wasn’t.

This novel is… a lot. It opens at a crawl, the kind of slow where you start wondering why you’re here and whether the payoff will be worth it. Then, somewhere around the halfway mark, the floor drops out, and you realize you’re in a very different book than the one you thought you were reading. I was genuinely glad I stuck around for the shift.

Part of the whiplash was my own doing. I didn’t check the genre or read a single review beforehand. I went in expecting women’s fiction with a slight academic edge. And to be fair, the early chapters lean into that familiar “who am I, who do I want to be” introspection. But by the time I reached the middle, I had to admit I’d completely misread the assignment.

There’s one scene, in particular, that made an involuntary, very loud “WTF” fly out of my mouth. Thank goodness I wasn’t in public. I sat there blinking at the page, wondering how we got from point A to whatever fresh chaos point B was supposed to be.

Only after the fact did I go back and see that this book is categorized as horror. Horror is not usually my genre of choice, mostly because so few books commit to the label. This one does. Enough that I set it across the room and gave it a suspicious look for a couple of days before picking it back up.

What Blake is doing here is layered: feminist theory, social commentary, satire (maybe), power dynamics, academic politics, hedonism, the whole messy tangle of how women are shaped and consumed by the systems around them. At a certain point, I stopped trying to decide whether it was satire and just let the book be what it was. I hadn’t planned on dropping everything to finish it, but that’s exactly what happened.

What begins as a slow simmer turns into something far stranger and more compelling. Blake’s writing is polarizing, but in the two books I’ve read so far, she hasn’t let me down. And that final twist? I’m not sure I needed it, but I was absolutely delighted it was there. Apparently, I did need that last jolt, because I’m still sitting here muttering, “Olivie Blake, what did you do to me?”

Crime Rangoon

Title: Crime Rangoon
Author: Vivien Chien
Published: December 30, 2025 by Minotaur Books
Format: Kindle, 311 Pages
Genre: Amateur Sleuth
Series: Noodle Shop Mystery #12

Blurb: Cindy Kwan, owner of Asia Village’s bookshop, The Modern Scroll, is privileged to host best-selling author, Charlene Chan for a signing in honor of the writer’s latest book, The Mystery of General Tso.

Lana Lee is equally excited for the appearance of her favorite author and even more so when Cindy asks her to be Charlene’s “handler” for the event. Taking her duties very seriously, Lana stays by the side of the prominent author to assist in anything that she might need.

With a line out the door and stretched through the plaza, Cindy is overjoyed at what a success this is for her shop. But, unfortunately for Cindy, her success comes with a the author is found dead in the mystery aisle, clutching a copy of her own book. Coincidentally the book’s plot matches the details of the murder.

Lana’s boyfriend, Detective Adam Trudeau, is charged with leading the case investigation, but finds himself overwhelmed when he realizes just how much of the book series is mimicked in reality. For the first time in their relationship, Adam calls on Lana to partner up with him to help solve the case. The couple must work through the novel to outwit the murderer, stay one step ahead, and beat the die-hard fan to the last chapter.

My Opinion: I just love this series. Every time I step back into Lana Lee’s world, I know I’m in for a good weekend—between the Mahjong Matrons, the restaurant chatter, and the inevitable chaos Lana and her friends tumble into, it’s always a fun escape.

This time around, the mystery caught me off guard. The culprit wasn’t someone I had on my radar. The clues were there, but I didn’t connect them, which makes me think my spidey sense might be slipping. Honestly, I don’t mind being surprised. It’s part of the charm.

There are conveniences that made me raise an eyebrow. Detective Adam Trudeau asking his girlfriend and her crew for help because he can’t quite figure things out on his own stretches believability. Let’s be real—no detective worth his badge is outsourcing his casework to his girlfriend’s social circle. And yet, here we are.

The suspect pool is a bit of a juggling act, too. There are several characters to keep straight, each hovering close enough to the victim to warrant a second look, even if their motives are more circumstantial than compelling. Lana and her fellow sleuths work through them one by one, fueled by donuts, pizza, late-night coffee, and whatever other snacks cross their path. It’s messy, it’s cozy, and it’s exactly the kind of rhythm this series thrives on.

My one real complaint is how the author seems to be dumbing down Adam Trudeau. He’s always been a steady presence, and watching him lose some of that intelligence is frustrating. Still, it’s not enough to pull me away. I’m in this series for the long haul, quirks and all.

The Will of the Many

Title: The Will of the Many
Author: James Islington
Published: May 23, 2023 by Gallery / Saga Press
Format: Kindle, 639 Pages
Genre: Fantasy
Series: Hierarchy #1

Blurb: The Catenan Republic – the Hierarchy – may rule the world now, but they do not know everything.

I tell them my name is Vis Telimus. I tell them I was orphaned after a tragic accident three years ago, and that good fortune alone has led to my acceptance into their most prestigious school. I tell them that once I graduate, I will gladly join the rest of civilised society in allowing my strength, my drive and my focus – what they call Will – to be leeched away and added to the power of those above me, as millions already do. As all must eventually do.

I tell them that I belong, and they believe me.

But the truth is that I have been sent to the Academy to find answers. To solve a murder. To search for an ancient weapon. To uncover secrets that may tear the Republic apart.

And that I will never, ever cede my Will to the empire that executed my family.

To survive, though, I will still have to rise through the Academy’s ranks. I will have to smile, and make friends, and pretend to be one of them and win. Because if I cannot, then those who want to control me, who know my real name, will no longer have any use for me.

And if the Hierarchy finds out who I truly am, they will kill me.

My Opinion: I went into The Will of the Many, genuinely curious why so many readers swear by it. I understand this is only the first installment in a planned four book series, and big fantasy worlds often need time to stretch their legs. Still, a hundred pages in, I was bored. By page three hundred, I wasn’t any less bored, though the plot finally started to show signs of life.

Vis Telimus, our orphaned protagonist, is positioned as clever and capable, but he survives more by luck than skill, and that imbalance wore thin. The world itself runs on a rigid hierarchy where the lower classes must surrender portions of their physical and mental energy—“Will”—to those above them. There’s even a chart at the front of the book explaining who cedes to whom, which tells you exactly how central this system is meant to be. The themes are the usual suspects: power, political maneuvering, class inequality, and a brutal social order that keeps everyone in their place.

And then come the tropes. The elite, dangerous school. The infiltration plot. The competitions and exams that might as well be death traps. The dark history. The hidden heritage. I kept flashing to the familiar beats of Disney stories, only without the comforting promise of a happily ever after. It’s not that these tropes can’t work; they absolutely can, but here they felt predictable rather than invigorating.

I know many readers loved this book, and by the final chapters, I could see the glimmers of what hooked them. There’s momentum, and there’s clearly a long game being set up. But for me, this novel was a reminder that some corners of fantasy simply aren’t my corner. I finished it, but I won’t be continuing the series.

Everything Is Tuberculosis

Title: Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection
Author: John Green
Published: March 18, 2025, by Crash Course Books
Format: Hardcover, 198 Pages
Genre: Non-Fiction

Blurb: Tuberculosis has been entwined with humanity for millennia. Once romanticized as a malady of poets, today tuberculosis is seen as a disease of poverty that walks the trails of injustice and inequity we blazed for it.

In 2019, author John Green met Henry Reider, a young tuberculosis patient at Lakka Government Hospital in Sierra Leone. John became fast friends with Henry, a boy with spindly legs and a big, goofy smile. In the years since that first visit to Lakka, Green has become a vocal advocate for increased access to treatment and wider awareness of the healthcare inequities that allow this curable, preventable infectious disease to also be the deadliest, killing over a million people every year.

In Everything Is Tuberculosis, John tells Henry’s story, woven through with the scientific and social histories of how tuberculosis has shaped our world—and how our choices will shape the future of tuberculosis.

My Opinion: I can’t be the only one who didn’t realize that John Green—yes, the John Green of The Fault in Our Stars and Looking for Alaska—also writes nonfiction. This novel was a surprise on that front alone, but the real surprise was how much I didn’t know about a disease I assumed belonged to history.

Everyone has heard of tuberculosis, but far fewer understand the political machinery, global inequities, and maddening contradictions that surround it. Green points out more than once that the countries with the highest burden of TB often don’t have access to the cure, while the countries that do have the cure rarely see the disease anymore. It’s a bleak little paradox that sets the tone for the rest of the book.

As I kept reading, I began to feel that Green wasn’t trying to give readers a complete education so much as he was nudging us toward our own deeper research. And it worked. I wandered down more than a few rabbit trails before reminding myself to return to what he wanted me to see: tuberculosis is, at its core, a disease of injustice.

One idea kept circling back to me. Centuries from now, readers will look at our 2026 medical practices with the same disbelief we feel when reading about treatments from the past. It’s humbling, and more than a little uncomfortable.

There is repetition in this book, but it’s purposeful. Green keeps pressing on the same truths: cost effectiveness should never determine who gets to live; pharmaceutical companies are driven by profit; and while TB can strike anyone, it is the poor—those without clean water, reliable food, or access to treatment—who bear the heaviest burden. When the world decides which lives are “worth” saving, the same people are always left behind.

The book is an easy read in terms of prose, but not a fast one, and certainly not a light one. The footnotes alone can send you off in ten different directions, and you’ll likely finish with more questions than answers. One question lingered for me: tuberculosis is notoriously good at evolving into drug resistant forms. So, what does the future look like when there have been no new TB drugs in forty years? That’s a long time for a microbe to invent new tricks.

Green doesn’t pretend to have all the answers, but he does make sure you understand the stakes. And once you do, it’s hard to stop thinking about them.